Micro-Influencers

Ask any marketing professional, marketing textbook, or even consumer what the most effective marketing tactic is and they will tell you that it is word of mouth. Years ago you used to pick up a phone and call a friend to gush about how great this new hair product is, now that’s replaced by posting a selfie on Instagram to all of your followers to show how great your hair looks now that you tried that new hair product. With the press of a button, everyone a person knows instantly gets a recommendation from someone they know and trust. And just like that, influencer marketing is born.

It didn’t take a genius to figure out that celebrities and athletes had huge social networks and “influence” over their followers. Brands started flocking to the likes of LeBron James and the Kardashian/Jenner clan forking over substantial sums to post a picture with their product and say how great it was. But here we are in 2017, and the general consumer has wised up to the fact that most of these mega-influencers don’t have a true affinity for the brands they are promoting other than the big check sent their way. What you gained in reach, you lost in authenticity.

In comes the rise of the “Micro-Influencer”, those people with somewhere between 1,000 – 30K followers that they’ve amassed over time from some funny tweets, quality photography on Instagram, their passion project lifestyle blog, etc. Micro-influencers could be anyone – your best friend, the person you saw at brunch last weekend whom you asked where they got their shoes, your techie friend who always knows the newest, coolest app (insert shameless plug for the FullContact App here), or countless others. That’s why, according to AdWeek, micro-influencers drive almost 7x the engagement of the average macro-influencer.

Micro-Influencers: They are just like us. That statement is the most beautiful and the most difficult part of using micro-influencers for your campaign. How do you sift through the masses of people out there on social media to find brand-right influencers? Your own customer file is the best place to start. FullContact provides the unique capability to connect an email in your customer database to their social profiles, including their reach and number of followers. One of your best customers may have a couple thousand followers and be a perfect micro-influencer for your brand. We’d love to help you find them.